Mom's Invention Gets Baby In The Swim
Ever try taking two squirmy, slippery little kids to the pool?
It’s not the easiest challenge that a new parent faces.
Just ask Catherine Hiscocks. After the birth of her second son, she liked to take her kids to the swimming pool at the Family Leisure Centre in Calgary.
One day, Zach, then two, was chasing a ball in the water. Hiscocks, who was holding her five-month-old on the side of the pool, called him to come back, but he didn’t hear her. Then Zach slipped. In seconds, his head was under the water. Hiscocks was desperate to rescue him, but she was still holding the baby. A man standing near the pool grabbed her infant and told her to run to her other child. She did, quickly pulling Zach to safety. “But all the time, I’m thinking (about the stranger), ‘Please, please don’t walk out of the pool with my baby,’ ” she says.
Both kids were fine, and the story could have ended there. Instead, Hiscocks went home and decided to make a waterproof baby carrier, one that — unlike the quilted cloth varieties found in baby stores across the city — could get wet but dry quickly and best of all, it was buoyant, which relieved her back and shoulders from the infant’s weight.
Developing the carrier hasn’t been easy, she says, and it’s been expensive, both in terms of time and money. But five years after the near tragedy, her patented WaterKiD Baby Carriers are for sale at 15 shops across Canada.
Photo by WaterKiD.
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